Podcast

Foreign.

Welcome to the podcast. This is Ryan Daniel Moran. We haven't posted much here on the audio feed for the podcast because we are changing up the Strategy here@Capitalism.com youm'll be hearing more about that in the coming weeks and months, but as soon as we're done with the next batch of recording, we'll be back to our regular programming. I think you're gonna really like what we have coming down the pike. I'm really proud of the work that we're doing here@capitalism.com we're getting really good results for our clients, we're adding new members to our programs, and overall morale is just really high. I wanted to share with you some of the lessons that I've learned so far this year. A lot has gone on and I think you'll see a theme in the lessons that I share with you today. So this is eight lessons that I've learned so far in 2025. Lesson number one one ounce of quality is Better Than a Pound of Average this might be the one area where I disagree with Gary Vaynerchuk. He's my idol. I agree with almost everything he says. But the one place where I disagree is that you should be posting a ton of content all of the time. That you should always do more. I think he gets a bad rap for being lumped in with hustle culture, but he definitely argues for posting on all platforms and having a heavy amount of volume of content. And I've experienced that one ounce of quality content outperforms a pound of just average content on our YouTube channel. We have grown like five times the rate of what we normally would be doing, and we're posting about 1/4 of the content. In fact, I think we've only posted three videos since January, and yet our content is growing faster. And that's because we slowed down and decided that we only wanted to release excellent content. I think this is true in all areas of business, maybe even all areas of life. I think about my book, 12 months to 1 million, and how I took 18 months to write that one piece of content and that book went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, be our number one source of business, and get me all kinds of exposure that I hadn't had before. That wouldn't have happened if I had tried to write that book. With ChatGPT, I put all of my energy into making one amazing quality piece of content and that changed the direction of my life and career. My most watched YouTube video to date is a speech that I gave way back in like 2015 and I spent months working on that speech. I couldn't give that amount of attention to a piece of content if I was trying to go for volume. And I know that based on experience. Maybe some people can pump out excellent pieces of work, whether it is content or it is a book or it is a product. Maybe they can pump out high quality stuff over and over again. I can't. But if I focus on prioritizing the quality, then I get the results that I'm hoping for with all of the quantity. Oftentimes, when we're trying to make the result happen faster, we default to doing more. My experience has been that when I do less but better work, I get the best results possible. So here's how I'm applying this Right now I'm creating less content, but better. I'm launching fewer products but doing better products. I'm doing fewer promotions but better promotions. And I'm making fewer investments, but they're more thoughtful investments. Overall, I'm following the essentialism principle of doing less but better. Alright, lesson number two. The longer term I can think, the more peaceful my Now When I first became a parent, I noticed that I would wake up and respond to a screaming baby and that ruined my whole day. I would wake up and I'd immediately be in this fight or flight angry, annoyed response. And I took that energy into the rest of my day. But I noticed that if I woke up before my daughter and I got a workout in, showered and made breakfast and then I tended to her, my entire day was different. That required that I plan my day the night before. In the same way, when I wake up and wonder what I'm going to do that day, then I am constantly responding to the needs of the moment. That means that I am sucked into whatever the most pressing emergency is, or whatever Facebook message I got, or the endless list of texts that I have unread on my phone. But if I plan my day the day before, I feel more peaceful. And if I can plan a week ahead, every day feels mostly peaceful. This means that I'm not responding to the most pressing matter, but I am following the plan that I set up for myself the day or the week prior. This is also true with investing. If I look at the stock market's results today, I will be engulfed with stress about what I'm supposed to do. Should I sell? Should I buy more? Should I be more aggressive? Am I doing the right thing? But if I'm planning for a lifetime or at least a decade, then I don't worry about the short term swing of things. The same is true with selling products on the Internet. If I am worried about today's sales, I'm going to be thinking about what I need to do in the short term in order to fix a short term sales problem. But if I'm thinking about what I'm building over the next year, then today is very peaceful. I need to be present with that client, I need to respond to that email, I need to create that piece of content. I need to do the thing that is in front of me and not worry about the short term results because I'm planning for a year out or more. So the longer term I can think, the more peaceful my Now.

Lesson number three wealth comes not from doing but from decisions I once had a mentor tell me that most people are too busy to make any real money. I can't help but wonder if that's because people are too busy to make any big decisions. If I look at where I made the most money in my life, it came from a few decisions. I've also lost the most amount of money from a few bad decisions. And the bad decisions that I made for the most part were when I was hoping for a short term result or I was really stressed and I was hurrying up and just wanted to make a decision and get it over with. But when I've got space to make good decisions that that's where I have the ability to make really impactful decisions that can change my life for the better. This is a weird paradox that I've been exploring when I feel really rushed and frenetic and I fill my day with responding to all these short term interruptions and messages. It's really hard for me to think about the long term decisions that can change my life or career. But when I have space, then it becomes very obvious for me to make the decisions that take my companies and my life forward. That means that I have to have proper space in my life and calendar to think about those long term decisions. Now of course there's effort required in anything, so there is doing that happens after a decision is made, but it's the decision that determines where we align our focus. The doing that we do on a regular basis is meaningless if it is not on the back of a clear decision that takes us in a very clear direction. I think a lot of us fill our calendars and fill our minds with a lot of distractions and frenetic interruptions and we wonder why we're not getting anywhere. When I feel that stress, it's often because I haven't made a clear decision about where I'm going and what I'm building. When I make that decision, that is where the doing becomes really obvious and that's where the long term wealth ends up being created. Here's how I'm applying this. Right now I'm taking more days off. I'm trying to avoid making decisions from that frenetic energy of trying to do too much at once. And I'm focusing on the big decisions that move my life forward. Here's a good example. At the beginning of this year, I took told my team that my one regret from the last two years was that we didn't make a conscious decision about where we wanted to take our content, specifically on YouTube. I wanted to rebrand the show less as Ryan Daniel Moran and more as capitalism dot com. We've been in this awkward kind of transition of that for a long time. And then I said, you know what, if I regret not making this decision previously, I might as well just make the decision now. In order to do that, we had to give ourselves permission to have space and not make two videos a week, or two podcasts a week so that we could realign our focus. But now that that clear decision is made, our actions are not frenetic. They're pointed in a very clear direction. All right, lesson number four Dopamine can be used for good or for evil I recently took five days away from technology. I had no phone, no laptop, no email, no text messages. I'd never done that before, ever. Like in two decades of being an entrepreneur, I had never stepped away from technology. And what I discovered is that I had to work harder to get my dopamine, but I still found ways to get it. I was bored and I was looking for things to do. I didn't want to check my phone because I didn't want to be sucked into social media, but I had a hard time figuring out what to do instead. Now I still found ways to get my dopamine, but they were in much more boring ways. In fact, I started to play cards with my five year old. I played charades with my nine year old. I sat outside and looked at nature and went for walks. On the surface this was very boring, but after a while I started to enjoy reading books, putting together puzzles, journaling, coming up with new ideas. And the longer that I stepped away from the constant short term dopamine, the more I started to think about the long term rewards that I would get from big decisions or more important actions Something I've noticed about myself is that I get a surge of energy every time I travel. It's like somebody injected me with rocket fuel or something. I thrive on the novelty of seeing new things and going new places. But when I'm home and I'm seeing the same things every day and I know what my day is going to look like and I'm a little bit bored, my energy goes a little bit lower. And without that external stimuli of the hustle and bustle of something going on or a new place to view, I start to feel tempted to scroll social media or read the news, or pay attention to the negative posts that my friends are making, or get way too involved in email or responding to Slack messages. If I allow myself to be sucked into that short term dopamine distraction of social media, news and negativity, everything in my life starts to crumble. But if I can resist that distraction, or if I have the external stimuli to distract me from that short term dopamine fix my battery charges very quickly. If I can keep my phone away from me, if I can keep my laptop shut when it doesn't need to be open, it's like the battery of energy is always full. The way that I wrote this down in my journal was.

My battery doesn't charge when I'm constantly draining it. And we give our energy to these short term meaningless distractions about what the President is doing or not doing, about what our friends think, about every issue happening in the world, every email and every text. And it is so tempting when I am bored, to just give my attention to that. And so I am exploring different ways of allowing myself to have more space to make more thoughtful decisions and use my dopamine for the most impactful things that move my life forward. All right, lesson number five. When I think about compounding returns, boring things become exciting. You're starting to see a theme here, aren't you? Last year I used an investment calculator to see how much I would need to invest into boring index funds in order to grow my wealth to $100 million, and I gave myself 40 years for it to compound, and I was stunned at the result. If The S&P 500, which historically produces a 9.7% return, if it were to produce at that average for the next 40 years, I would have to invest $150,000 a year for 40 years in order for my wealth to compound into $100 million. I couldn't believe that the number was so low, and when I ran that calculation, it made Me excited to do the really boring stuff. All of a sudden the thing that I had been avoiding, the most basic investment plan in the world, started to look a lot more enticing. I have given so much money to bad investments in my career and I did that because it was exciting in the short term. But if I had just put that money into very boring long term index funds, I would be a lot wealthier today. Now, in the same way I calculated the growth of my supplement company Sheer Strength, I calculated what its growth rate was over the life cycle of me owning it before I sold it to private equity. Now for reference, our first month in business we did about $8,000 in sales. The first month that was I think June of 2013. When we sold the company it was at $1 million per month in revenue. So I calculated what the average monthly growth rate was for that business over 48 months and it was 10%.

So in other words, that business grew on average 10% per month for 48 months and it created an eight figure exit. So month one did about $8,000 in sales. Month two 8,800. Month three 10,000. Month four 11,000, then 12,5. But over time it compounded into a million dollar per month business. When I think about those types of compounding returns, the boring things start to get really exciting. When I think about growing a business 10% per month or getting 10% more reviews, or increasing my lead flow by 10%, I don't naturally get excited. But when I think about how that compounds over 12 to 48 months, those boring returns get really sexy. In fact, now I just set that goal across all of my E commerce businesses. We don't have to kill it this month. We don't have to double our sales with this launch. All we need to do is increase our sales by about 10% per month. If we do that, then we will just crush all of our goals. This year and next year looks really exciting. So when I think about compounding returns, the boring stuff becomes really exciting.

Lesson number six. Until I have a plan, I'm just guessing and hoping for the best. I shared with a friend recently that I was really happy with the results that I'm getting in the gym. I feel better about my physical body than I've felt in a long time. I'm in really good shape. I feel good about my movement and flexibility. I just feel really good about my body right now. And this friend that I was sharing this with helped me observe why I I felt so good about my physical body. It wasn't the results that I was getting, it was the fact that I had a plan and I was sticking to it. I'm not constantly wondering about what I'm going to eat or how I'm going to move or when I'm going to work out. I have that plan and I am sticking to it. If I look at the the years prior when I did not feel as good about my body, I was mostly guessing. I was not tracking my food. I was bouncing from diet to diet or trying to discover what the best eating plan would be. But now that I have a plan, all of my chaotic energy is aligned in one direction. In fact, I get kind of excited about trying this workout or making this food fit into my eating plan. I have a plan. And now my crazy, frenetic, chaotic brain can go find new ideas that support the plan. But until I have a plan, I'm just guessing and hoping for the best. This is also true in my investing practice. Now that I have a plan, my chaotic, crazy brain is constantly looking for new things to invest in that will fit the plan. Previously, I would have been distracted, wondering, is this a better plan? Is this a better idea? Should I invest in that stock over here? Now, I can still get excited about a new idea or a new investment, but I have to make it fit my rules and my plan. Now, in my businesses or within my relationships, I don't always have a plan. And that's when I feel stressed. That is when I feel confused, when I feel that I know that I need to make a decision about what plan I'm going to follow. Then I can monitor the results of that plan and make adjustments as needed. This comes up a lot in coaching calls when I'm working with clients in the 1%. There are so many things that you can do to grow your audience or to grow your sales, but none of it matters until you have a plan that you will stick to. So part of my job as a coach or an advisor is is to tell people not to follow that new idea and to stick to the plan that's in front of them. To follow the eight steps to a Million Dollar Business. And if you follow the plan, you'll get results. And then we can make adjustments as needed along the way. But until there's a plan, I'm just guessing and hoping for the best. Okay, lesson number seven. I didn't have a catchy title for this one. It's just that incentives matter. They matter a lot. And our incentives are not necessarily logical. They're usually where we're getting our dopamine. So wherever we're getting our dopamine becomes our incentive, and we're gonna do more of that thing. The place that this has showed up in my life has been as a leader of a team and trying to recruit talent or create incentive structures for the team to be motivated for us to hit our goals. My style of leadership in the past has been let's set a big goal and if we hit it together, then we'll all celebrate and I might give bonus checks or something. But I have been experimenting with something different recently where I'm setting more micro targets and incentivizing certain people on my team to hit those targets. And if they hit those targets or if we all hit them together, then there's bonuses or upside available to them. And what I have noticed is that other people are taking responsibility in ways that I have never experienced before. As a leader, I'm noticing that the expectations that I have for people that I will bring onto the team are much higher. And I notice that. I feel like we're a real team heading in the right direction rather than a bunch of people who are working for Ryan. That's new for me, and that is the result of creating incentives that are exciting. It means being willing to give up control so that people have influence over the upside that they experience. That's been an adjustment for me as a leader, but it's been one that, as I've leaned into, I've started to enjoy because now I can actually root for someone else to hit their goals within the company, knowing that the incentive plan motivates them to do that, and that grows the business, which makes everyone more money. It's been a big flip in my understanding of leadership and has been one that has been very rewarding to participate in. All right, last but not least, lesson number eight. Much of my stress comes not from comparing myself to others, but comparing myself to what I think my life should look like. And that's usually based on other people's social media posts.

I don't have any commentary for that one. It's just a lesson that I'm learning. Hey, we will be back to our normal programming and the interviews and solo casts that you're used to hearing here@capitalism.com pretty soon. In the meantime, I might pop in here from time to time with a personal update, but we'll be back to normal programming very soon. Thanks for listening. I'll see you guys soon.